Apple dramatically improved its Notes app with iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan last fall thanks to enhanced photo support, new formatting tools, URL snippets, a share extension, and an iCloud Drive backend to keep it all in sync. So much so that people have actually been moving from Evernote to Apple Notes and not looking back, but there hasn’t been a simple way to make the leap until now. Included in the OS X 10.11.4 software update is a new option in the Notes app that makes migrating content from Evernote to Apple Notes a very simple process. Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

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A Mac running OS X 10.11.4, it’s currently in beta although there’s a public beta version available as well, this will likely be available to everyone next month

Evernote for Mac, you can download it for free from the Mac App Store

Notes on your Mac, this is pre-installed, just make sure you’re signed in with your iCloud account and using iCloud Drive for the full experience

Note: Migration doesn’t work yet on iPhones and iPads. You’ll need a Mac to do the heavy lifting, then your migrated notes will sync across all platforms including the web. With that in mind, let’s get started.

Log in to Evernote, but first click the ‘Sign in’ option as ‘Create an account’ deceptively defaults on launch.

Let all your notes sync in (you’ll know they’re finished loading in when the spinner next to your email address in the top left stops spinning), then look around and decide which notes you want to migrate. By default, you view all your notes across different notebooks together.

To migrate everything all at once, click ‘Edit’ at the top of your screen while you’re in Evernote, then click ‘Select All’ to pick all of your entries for exporting. This makes bulk migration easier, but Evernote includes some notes of their own from time to time (which might be why people are migrating) so you might want to be more selective. If you’re like me and just have a few entries, you can hold the Command (⌘) key and click each note individually.

Optionally, you can view your notes in separate collections by clicking the ‘Notebooks’ section on the left side. This lets you choose which collections you want to export. However, you can only select one notebook at a time.

Once you’ve chosen which notes or notebooks to export, the export process is very easy. While you’re in Evernote, click ‘File’ at the top of your screen, then click the ‘Export Notes…’ option.

Next you’ll see a menu with a few options like what you want to name your Evernote export file, where you want to save it, and which file type it will use. The default ‘My Notes’ filename is fine, I chose Desktop as the save location to make finding it later easier, and we’ll use the ‘Evernote XML Format (.enex)’ for this.

Once you hit ‘Save’ and see the ‘Export complete.’ dialog, click ‘OK’ and verify that you now have a file on your desktop or wherever you picked to save it called ‘My Notes.enex’.

Now you’re finished with Evernote and can close the app. Next, launch Notes and click ‘File’ at the top of your screen, then click the ‘Import Notes…’ option. Remember, this requires OS X 10.11.4 or later.

This will bring up a new window that lets you select the .enex file we exported earlier. Choose the ‘My Notes.enex’ file, then click the ‘Import’ button to start the importing process. You may see a prompt with a warning that your notes “may look different in Notes”, then select ‘Import Notes’ to go forward. Remember, your data is still in Evernote at this point if anything goes wrong.

Finally, Notes will migrate your data in and file your notes from Evernote into a nearly created Imported Notes folder. Look around and make sure everything looks correct, then you can move your migrated notes into their own folders if you prefer.

And that’s it! For me, the only data I had left in Evernote was from the defunct Evernote Food app where I briefly journaled my favorite meals, but I hadn’t bothered to try more complicated migration methods in the past. The new import option on OS X 10.11.4 makes migrating notes from Evernote to Apple Notes much simpler than previous workarounds, and all of the dates and formatting for my entries remained intact.

Ideally, a similar migration on iPhones and iPads would help even more users make the switch, but this new method works effectively for users with access to a Mac and iCloud pushes the data to Notes on iOS and the web as well.

If you’re completely satisfied with Apple Notes and no longer need Evernote, you can even delete your data there, deactivate your account, and request that your email be removed from their system for good using these instructions.

The software update also adds password-protected notes to the Apple Notes app on OS X and iOS, with Touch ID devices even having the option to use the fingerprint sensor to unlock entries. Currently in developer and public betas, these new features will likely be available to all users next month.

Why would that be great? And what does cross platform even mean today? You mean compatible with the Default Notes app on Windows? Does Windows even have a Notes app? You want Apple’s rich Notes platform, that spans OS X, iOS, and iCloud.com to be opened in Notepad on Windows? I don’t get it.

Basically what I’m saying is that having a native Evernote app on Windows is better than using the iCloud Notes feature via the web. I haven’t really given the Notes web app a good run since iOS 9 when they switched notes off IMAP. Maybe it’s better now, but I just don’t like Apples iCloud apps. Mail is a terrible experience and that’s where a lot of the feeling comes from.

Super delayed comment, but I found this article right after Evernote said they were changing their privacy policy to allow certain employees to see your notes (they quickly retracted after backlash)… Just reading through comments and thought I’d answer yours, in case you haven’t gotten your answer.

If I’m understanding correctly, audio recordings (at least for iOS are in the Voice Memos app). I haven’t played with it enough, but you should be able to record a “voice memo” (or any audio) and using the share button, share to Notes app.

This is like siphoning your gas from a BMW into a Lada. Yay! Notes is far from being able to replace or replicate the features of Evernote.

Unfortunately, even though there’s a lot to dislike about Evernote, there’s simply nothing else available today that has all of its formatting and embedding features. I’ve tried pretty much every single app that pretends to be even remotely similar.

hilarious, this made me laugh! How come no one is commenting that a) if you’ve exported a Stack, all Notebooks are NOT converted into folders; b) of course all tags are lost, Notes.app doesn’t have tags. Also, it imports an HTML mess ….

The thing is now Evernote only allows you to use it from two devices so it’s severely limited. Plus it bothers you all the time to purchase. Granted it’s worth it if you use many of it’s features, which I don’t. The most annoying thing is copy pasting things into Evernote it makes them into tables you can’t edit and things end up looking pretty crap.

I have an iCloud subscription and absolutely love it. The web interface for it is slick and now I can use Notes on all my Mac devices without issue. And it’s a breeze. Love it!

Just saw this and tried it out on a couple of my Evernote notebooks. It worked fairly well, and quite well with web clipped (simplified articles) that I had in Evernote. I’ve been an Evernote Pro user for several years now, but frankly been frustrated with the app updates, and all the product pushing they have been doing.

Evernote has two things going for it that Notes does not:

1. Web Clipping. If Apple could take the Reader View of a webpage and embed that as a note it would be pretty close to perfect. An example is recipe websites. They are often crowded with extraneous links and ads to other things but I often want the text and images of the recipe in question, this is where Evernote’s Web Clipper excels for me. The current way Note links webpages is not at all sufficient.

2. OCR. As a pro user I’ve often used and even relied on the post-processing of images for full-text search. It works well. Take a picture of a document or of a meeting white board and save it to Evernote. You will later be able to text search those notes and find them even though the text was in an image. I don’t see this as something Apple will ever implement.

Chris, I hated the app pushing, feature bloat, and marketplace stuff (there were Evernote socks!), but since about September, they’ve done a bit of restructuring, killed several of their extraneous apps, basically got rid of the Marketplace, and seem to be really focused on the app and creating a great experienced. i haven’t been this excited about Evernote in quite a while.

At least 3 things. Evernote allows collaboration and shared notes, so for example I can create a note and share it with my wife, who can make her own changes. Any changes either of us makes on a shared note syncs anywhere either of us uses Evernote. We USED to be able to do that with text notes in Apple’s Notes, but the new version only allows one to access upgraded (or newly-created) notes in ones primary account. Notes does not currently allow collaboration or sharing.

My few remaining notes on Evernote are counting days, now that this is out :)
I stopped using Evernote when iOS 9 came out and I’ve already moved most of my stuff across. Then Evernote can be as aggressive / annoying as they want with their remaining user base… :)

Having said that, for any serious note taking I still use Pages. I tried using Notes for note taking (both during seminars and during business meetings) and Notes isn’t quite “there” yet. Especially for seminars.

Some things I’d like to see in Notes in the future:
– be able to colourise text on iOS (only available on OSX)
– be able to add/customise paragraph styles. “title” and “heading” do not suffice in any case. Not for any serious note taking (e.g. “quoted text”, “rule”, “warning” are some custom styles I’d create). One set of paragraph styles for all notes, synced across iCloud, should do the trick
– be able to zoom in on text / set default font size for viewing. My iPad mini in “laptop” mode (with bluetooth keyboard) can be a bit of a pain sometimes, especially when I want to write text in an accented language

While on the topic, when copying content from Notes to Pages in iOS, text formatting and images aren’t copied across. In OSX it works a lot better, except for – doodles get copied on a default canvas size, rather than actual content size
– lists (like this one) are copied as plain text with tabs

Implementing things are a tightrope here, adding everything mentioned in the comments would bloat Notes to being another Pages. I’m also not sure Notes is supposed to be Evernote. Notes is the thing you make quick notes with that gets synced and sits in iCloud. I don’t know that it’s supposed to microwave your food :)

Evernote has been reliable, always worked great and worked across platforms for me. I see no reason why I should switch to Apple Notes and iCloud? I honestly don’t have that much faith in iCloud. I have also turned of iMessage simply because it caused more trouble than it was worth. This is of course just my experience, but while I think Apple makes generally amazing hardware, their software is less amazing.

For me it’s a switch. I migrated all Evernote notes to Notes.app only because everything in my household is Apple. I stopped using windows 6 years ago. If I ever need those notes on windows, I just open iCloud.com. The biggest limitation in using Evernote for me was its 60mb monthly quota. It’s like upload 5 notes with pictures and you are done. Yes it’s cross-platform, but I don’t want to pay for it, that’s the main reason I stopped using Evernote 2 years ago and been using Notes or Word since that.

Article should include update: today, Evernote changed it’s usage policy so people can only use the free version across two devices. More than that and you have to upgrade. So all the more reason to migrate to Notes.

I migrated 245 notes from Evernote to Apple Notes using my MAC. Everything went smoothly. BUT…my iPhone notes app is completely busted! It has a series of numbers next to all my folders, and crashes every time I go into it. I cannot access ANY notes on my phone now. Anyone know of a fix?!!!

Evernote was and has been my absolute favorite notes app. I used it extensively for note taking in meetings (on iPad and iPhone, it even auto populates location and meeting name from my calendar), to do lists, web clippings and other misc notes (like code segments, random thoughts etc), all nicely organized in geotagged folders/notes with tags etc.

However, recently I was forced to migrate elsewhere because now my work blocks Evernote server for intellectual property concerns (they basically block any non-Microsoft cloud based apps / services and even for MS apps, it’s employer domain addressed server addresses).

In addition, Evernote now started charging for more than two devices. Unless you want to use Evernote with a web browser only, it’s a pain and I don’t want to pay monthly fee for an app that I can’t even use at work.

So, the instructions above worked well for me. It took a little while to re-generate my folder structure and migrate notes from “Imported Notes” folder but at least now I have all my devices (at home I am all Apple) accessing Notes. At work, I can still use my iPhone to take notes and web interface to connect to iCloud. It’s not a perfect solution as before but it works and it’s free.